This past week a pulse of excitement made it way through out the iOS development community. This was due to Apple’s announcement of when WWDC’s will be held (June 13th). A yearly event were Apple shows off the next iteration of their operating systems and SDKs. Last year was exceptionally exciting for game developers due to the amount of new native frameworks that were released, as well as update to the current frameworks. The biggest additions being UI updates to the SpriteKit/SceneKit editors and the new framework,GameplayKit.
Before last years WWDC, creating a SpriteKit scene using their UI was a horrible experience. There was no ability to specify what class the sprites were, or preview actions. All you were able to do was basically drag sprites onto a scene. But that is all in the past. With iOS 9 came the release of their new Scene Editor. It has the ability to create custom actions and preview them. Along with a new camera class to allow panning and zooming effects in games. Reducing a lot of the annoyances of building a SpriteKit game.
Overall GameplayKit was the coolest new framework that was released. It provided a bunch of new built mechanisms for game developers to use. Such as min-max trees for create basic AI or pathing algorithms that can be quickly placed into SpriteKit games. But most excitedly they programmed a modified version of OpenSteer. Which provides movement behaviors for enemies or NPC. Such has avoiding a player or moving towards a player.
The session for GameplayKit can be watched here as the segment on the OpenSteer stuff is at the 17:46 minute mark. It is really fun to watch the spaceships in their demo move around.
What last years WWDC showed me was that Apple is activity investing their human recourses into develop better gaming frameworks. This makes me very exited to see what addition they will add and how they will improve what they currently have. Since there is still a lot they are laking in terms of native gaming frameworks. But, what is amazing is how SpriteKit was only released two iOS versions ago. Marking the beginning of Apple’s interest in creating gaming frameworks. So they have come a long way.
Is there anything you would like to see Apple announce come June 13th?
I’m excited to see what Apple will announce with regard to cloud gaming at WWDC. I think the new Apple TV shows Apple is investing a lot into cloud gaming. It’s cloud integration allows you to save your games from your phone or iPad to the Apple TV so you will be able to continue a game from your iPhone seamlessly on your Apple TV. I think this level of cloud integration is exciting as more longer games come to mobile. I remember when I accidentally deleted a game on my iPad and when I redownloaded it all my progress was gone. Cloud gaming stops that problem from happening. Cross-platform cloud saves are very exciting, but I hope Apple announces more cloud gaming technology at WWDC as that will be the future of gaming.